DESIGN DEVELOPMENT AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF SOLAR POWERED SPRAYER WITH WATER LEVEL INDICATOR

Abstract

Currently in Bangladesh farmers use hand operated sprayer or motorized sprayer in agricultural fields. Generally in the agricultural field, traditional or conventional techniques like shoulder mounted spraying system have been used because it is cheaper, easy to use and less costly. Continuous use of traditional energy resources will have high risk of rising in price and energy depletion. Now-a-days there is a great need for ‘’conservation of energy’’ and application of renewable energy. This paper presents the design, development and evaluation of a solar powered spraying system. The specific objectives of this research is to design and fabricate the solar powered sprayer by considering parameters like desired spraying rate, low weight, low cost, faster coverage of area and high field efficiency. A two-nozzle sprayer was fabricated with MS bar frame and 4-wheel trolley with water level indicator which runs on power source as a DC battery (12 volt, 8.2 Ah) via solar panel and runs by a DC motor (12 volt, 2A). The entire unit is portable and is operated by one labor. The design mainly eliminates the shoulder mounting sprayer setup which causes back pain, uses of fossil power which is non-renewable and hazardous and extensive use of manpower. The machine was compared to conventional sprayer and found more efficient. Pump efficiency almost 83.33% found for single nozzle and 93.33% for double nozzle and the sprayer is 58% time saving than manual sprayer. The operating cost of the machine was 802 Tk ha-1 . Also found capital recovery factor, capital consumption and annual cost of the solar operated sprayer were 0.26, Tk 1520 and Tk 41665, respectively.